It is funny as Christine Jones, coming from the exact same premise as yours, go on another track in the video I previously linked : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3_w_Gp1mLM . From 10’25" on, she adresses the vegetable nutrient depletion and the vegetable “stupidity” (as you say) from another perspective: soil life, soil health, endophytes, biochemical energy, catabolic/anabolic processes. She ends up with great results too.
I believe that is a bit like looking at 2 different revolutionary schools of thought… both of them having incredible qualities… and which could profit from decompartimentalisation… so to say from hybridization. 
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As far as a mineral shortage in the soil: in many soils (including mine) I think this is true. There are, however, soils that are short from our point of view.
For instance, let’s think about a geologically old, sand-based soil in the tropics (high temperatures, high rainfall) that has been intensively cropped for a long time. This soil is largely composed of silica sand; and while that’s nice if you want to make glass, it isn’t particularly promising as far as plant or human nutrition goes.
By comparison, take my soil: a geologically young (recently renewed by glaciers and aeolian deposition), clay-based alkaline soil in a dry, cool climate. My soil is going to have a lot more of the nutrients needed for crop and human nutrition. If anything, it has too many minerals!
Now, wild plants do grow on the very unpromising soils! But they aren’t the same wild plants that grow on the promising soils. They are adapted to very low nutrient levels.
The question is: if we lived on low-nutrient plants (most of which are not edible anyway), what would that do to our health?
In a very depleted soil, our job may be to bring the minerals in, and then make sure we hang on to them by carefully recycling all organic matter (including humanure). That is how the great rainforests work in the tropics. The underlying soil is infertile, but over long geological time periods, nutrients blow in on the wind, very slowly. (Dust from the Sahara fertilizes the Amazon Rainforest.) The forest is fine-tuned to hang onto this very slow incoming trickle of fertility, so that it builds up into something substantial over time. But this is why, once the rainforest is cleared and the soil exhausted, it does not come back without help; it would take a long time for that fertility to build back up again.
We can replicate this on a human life-span by importing that fertility (though the use of rock phosphate, or whatever else our soils may need) and then being sure that we retain them by not exporting materials (including crops for sale.)
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Another great use for making your own compost (not bought) is as an inocculant for seed starts and Spring garden prep. Just a little sprinkle on top of your starter tray soil, and a light topping on your beds, should help new plants adjust to their new home in your garden. The microbes in the compost being mostly from your own local soil, well fed on kitchen scraps and leaf litter, with maybe a little old-forest humus from nearby hill tops (in my case, the tree-line abutting my property, several inches deep in old leaf-rot- beautiful, earthy smelling stuff.)
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I believe a lot of seed companies occupy top soils to make big, healthy looking and beautiful seeds. They can afford it and to be better than the others and sell more it will have moved in that direction. Especially with people being so superficial about things as nowadays.
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Like Oregon in the US, yes, sure. Fortunately, as far as France is concerned, most of our organic seed sellers, or at least the small scale ones, are located in the South, where the weather and soils are not that gentle.
nitrogen-fixing trees : Gleditsia triacanthos, Laburnum cytisus, Genista aetnensis…
many are in pioneer trees
Awesome! Thank you!
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I started watching that video and found it interesting. I hope to watch the whole thing soon.
As much as I would like to take credit for the idea, it’s not really mine at all. I read it in the Landrace Gardening book. I am rereading it now. The concept of the idea came from the Parable of the Hill People in chapter 2.
Some basic, fundamental things are not covered well in the mainstream gardening literature – like how dirt is actually full of minerals, because it’s essentially rock fragments. Sand is larger than silt. Silt is larger than clay. Yet they are all rock fragments of varying rock types.
When it comes to erosion, I have wondered if some of the mainstream claims are being exaggerated. I can understand how top soil can run into bodies of water. But come on, a lot of the dirt just goes to the next lot. I live next to cotton production. When they run the big machines in a drought, guess who gets free dirt?
These rock pieces will continue to fragment into smaller and smaller pieces as time progresses. Each time these pieces break apart, more minerals become available to the plant. That’s the way I understand it. So essentially, the roots of plants are essentially surrounded by abundant potential resources. They just need to work on harvesting what they need.
Not only that, there is an abundant supply of carbon and nitrogen in the air supply.
The plant, or other organisms it trades with, will need to convert some of these building blocks into digestible forms. I just don’t want to be the organism it relies on.
yep. Two things:
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plant nutrition: I believe there was good insights in the How Microbes help local adaptation course by James White. Plants are trading with fungis and bacterias… giving them carbohydrates they cannot synthethise, and those giving minerals they are the only one able to disolve. Fungis and bacterias are dependant on organic maters (quantities, but also qualities).
(if I get it correctly) it is not a problem of mineral quantities available it is how accessing it.
If you want dig in some research papers… mainstreams don’t help us that much, but there are some giants, or some good insights: two papers co-authored by Séguy, and Husson I met last summer:
Hussonetal2014KaindorfHumusexpertmeeting.pdf (7.0 MB)
No-till_and_cover_crops_shift_soil_microbial_abund.pdf (431.7 KB)
I believe I know who gets it
I won’t search for papers but here but in this short video (1’30") you will see the best french expert of soil microbiology saying what he has said to farmers 100000 times over the decades: “it is not the rocks that come up, it is the soil that is gone”. Like what happened in the Fertile Crescent over a longer period, depth of tilling and multiple soil perturbation now making the destruction exponential…
Then you can buy (or make a business of selling ) these:
A stone collector…
But more seriously: a civilisation that make rivers go brown is not (could not be?) durable… Rivers never go brown when the soil is covered. Like there is no erosion under a forest: or to say it more precisely: the organic balance sheet representing the carbon dynamics is always positive. So forests accumulate carbon rich compounds, with their great remediation capacities (water infiltration, water retention, blablabla)… There has even been evidence of dramatic losses of soil (i.e. organic mater) in fully flat grounds. The hotter and the rainier your climate is the fastest this carbon depletion goes. It went from 8% to 1-2% in the very temperate France, from the 1950s to nowadays.
Still at the garden level it will always (?) be easy compensating our losses with imported stuff: all things from raw matter (straw, mulch) to high analysis inputs (NPK). The first favoring more soil life (i.e. bacterias, fungis, etc.) than the later. Compost, pre-digested by bacterias when it heats (most of Carbon gone, all minerals left in very digestible forms), being in the middle of these. Then, if you dezoom a bit… but I start to ramble
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I am thankful the soil erodes because without that happening, we would not have dirt and minerals!
I don’t know any commercial cotton growers, even the ones around me. I need to do a better job with that. If I knew them, I would ask them to put a soil line marker down. And check it again in 5 years.
It would seem these fields would get sunken in, compared to the land around them. Like, a cotton field that gets tilled twice a year, would the elevation not shrink or lower over a period of time? I pass by commercial fields all the time in my travels and I haven’t noticed this phenomenon.
It’s obvious the machines throw dirt in the air, and some of it travels. But I wonder if we are “making a mountain out of a molehill” in terms of exaggeration in order to suppress efficiency of production at home in order to make us less competitive so we will buy more and more foreign produce that was grown with more efficient methods?
I can tell you what I have seen, in one of my fields there is a wall build of blocks, it was built maybe like 30 years ago. There is a path that it was tilled very often, like every couple of months for 25 years. The path is only rocks now, all the top soil is gone.
At the time they made a trench to make the wall, an now I can see the foundation of the wall. It is kind of easy to check if the level of soil has changed, because the foundations is showing and the soil is like 30cm / 1foot down.
This is the soil now, the rest of the garden is not so bad.
Depends a lot of the type of soil that you have, does your soil filter the water or does it just accumulate? You have underground rivers in the zone? Your land is flat of there is an slope?
I seen some farmland that are very sunken. I do not know if there is an slope in the land of the soil has been lowered but every year they remove tons of stones from the farm with a machine. So the level should decrease. It is like 3+ feet down to the road.
Another example is this farmland. Have a lower level than the road?
A piece of land that has only recently been cultivated you won’t notice it much, but a piece of land on a farm that has been tilled for hundreds of years… I call them rock deserts. Probably my generation will be fine, the next, two generations down the road… not so much. In one of my garden I am in the second generation and the soil it is not very good. I have seen the neighbors’ land and they are not very promising.
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Every time they til and the wind blows or it rains they lose soil. The thickness of one sheet of paper over an acre is one ton of topsoil. See how they plow and create big bollowing clouds of soil dusting up and blowing around.
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Yes, without erosion, there would be no soil! (I think that is something that permaculture types often miss; everything flows. Mountains are pushed up by plate tectonics or vulcanism, and then eroded away; we and all other living things are harnessing that very slow “flow”.)
The key, though, is the rate; today erosion is running much faster than at other times. My guess is that wind erosion is a different problem than water erosion. With wind erosion, the soil is mostly still there some place; after the dust bowl settled down, the soil was all still “around”, though not in the same place. The problem was that the blowing dust make agriculture impossible for a couple of years. Water erosion, though, will certainly remove the soil; in much of the middle of the country, mobilized soil will eventually flow down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, for instance. (That flow is currently something like 170 million tonnes of soil a year according to a statistic I found online.)
Two other dimensions to this; subsoil doesn’t grow plants as well as topsoil. Over a certain amount of time, subsoil can become topsoil; but if it is constantly being removed, that process won’t keep up. And, some minerals are soluble and are leached away from the soil, even if the soil grains (sand and so forth) are still around. For instance, in an acidic soil with heavy rainfall and insufficient plant cover/organic matter, the phosphorus will leach away into watercourses and out to the ocean. (And along the way, it will create algal blooms that will destroy the life in the waterway).
I guess that’s just another example of the same issue; we are speeding everything up. A little phosphorus leaching into the rivers is good; a lot leaching in is bad. Etc.
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The whole “the soil has all the minerals your plant needs” probably needs some nuance. My soil is low in potassium, my squash don’t like it. All squash I grow in uncomposted soil will barely get to the fruit stage, and seeds are unviable.
So I can spend 10+ years trying over and over again till I finally get one with viable seeds to start my landrace with, or start from composted spots and start with that as a landrace, which hopefully at some point also survive in uncomposted soil.
Maarten
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I live in the South part of the Southern Seaboard area of the map below, in mostly flatlands with slight slopes.
I’ve never seen rocky soil like you have shown in your pictures, not on real life.
The roads here are also elevated from farmlands. I think it has to do with engineering design to move water away from the roads. It’s funny that your mind when there, because just today, I was studying the same thing on our roads before I read your post.
There are many dirt roads around here in the woods, just dirt and rocks. The rocks are put there for traction. The native soil does not carry that high of a concentration of rocks around here, except for uncommon places. I have never heard of a situation where people need to add more dirt on these roads because of erosion; even though you can see dirt on people’s trucks all the time. I have never noticed a shortage of dirt anywhere in my life, except when people talk about it on YouTube or online.
I will dig a hole this weekend and show you what it looks like. I don’t really recognize topsoil. It looks like the same stuff right below it except for a darker color due to decaying grass and such. If I were to dig a hole and remove the dirt, in a year or two, I think the same color will show up in the new layer of “topsoil.”
Have you had success growing other types of vegetable crops in your native, unaided soil? Like tomatoes for example? I am curious to see if you can find success growing something else that also needs potassium.
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This is something I have wondered about too. It rains like 60 inches a year where I live, and probably has so for a very long time. I would think by now all of these water soluble minerals would have all leached out by now. I mean, water soluble means being able to dissolve in water. There’s a lot of water over here! We get hurricanes, flash floods and tornadoes.
The wildfire strips the ground naked and yet here we are.
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If you’ve got a clay soil, some of the soluble nutrients stick to the clay particles so they don’t get washed out. Also, a lot of them are bound up in the plants; and as soon as one plant decays and releases them, another plant snaps them up. At least, that’s how it works in an ecosystem! And that’s the role of weeds that come up after fires and other disturbances; quickly gobble up all the nutrients so they don’t get lost.
Interestingly, most of our vegetable and grain crops started out as weeds, which partly explains why they are so “hungry” compared to many wild plants; they never had to develop stingy/frugal habits, because they were generally facing the glut of nutrients after a flood, fire, landslide, or whatever. Then, once the levels started to drop, they would die back and be replaced by more cautious plants who were in it for the long haul. Also explains why other weeds like our gardens, but don’t grow in the true “wild”.
The earliest forms of agriculture were slash and burn and flood-retreat farming, both of which mimic this pattern.
Edited to add: If I had a large enough piece of land, I’d do some variant of “slash and burn”, though it might be more “till” or “hoe” rather than burn, and more grassland rather than forest since I’m in a dry climate. Gardening a plot for a couple of years, then abandoning it for a decade or so.
I think slash and burn was the only type of agriculture done over here pre Columbus. The closest major city to me is about 300 years old, one of the oldest in the Gulf Coast. I believe the natives would slash and burn around the rivers and creeks, and move up and down the rivers as it got hot or cold.
My main issue with the anti erosion narrative, just like the anti nitrogen narrative, is it’s being used to propagandize people into soil worship and failure to grow crops at a profit. When I say “profit,” I don’t mean money. I mean adding all of your time and expenses up and comparing it to the harvest value. I am the consumer and producer. Was it worth it to me to produce X crop? The value is up to me, according to my own set of values, not necessarily the economic value assigned to it by the grocery store.
For me, I want to eat a stressed plant. I want that plant to be whacked out, fighting against all manner of problems so it will produce vitamins and compounds I can use to build myself up.
These kind of narratives disempower people. It causes them to not grow their own food due to making it harder to make that “profit.” Then they buy “organic” from the grocery store that is imported. Do you know how many chemicals are allowed in organic production? It’s a joke.
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I think you’re wrong about disempowerment. If I were not obtaining the yields I can get by composting, I would probably not be able to grow as much of my own food as I do. Then I would have to buy it, and I certainly can’t afford to buy the quality that I grow – some of it is probably unobtainable at any price, even. If I add up the time and effort I spend on composting and I spend that instead on paid work (leaving aside the question of where this paid work is going to come), and I then spend that money on food, I’m going to be buying food that actively damages the environment.
My plants still get plenty of stress from wind, high and low temperatures, disease (especially in humid weather), and pests, so I’m not worried about that; making compost out of readily-available waste is not going to eliminate stressors on plants.
But as I tried to make clear in my first response, one of the most disempowering things, especially for new gardeners, is being repeatedly told they’re doing things “wrong” by a purist who doesn’t understand either their context or their priorities. Don’t be that purist.
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